This talk is a reading and presentation of the book Taco (Bloomsbury 2025). Addressed to both academic and general readers, the book is a chronicle of the author who, as a Mexico City-born migrant to the US, has experienced tacos on both sides of the border, and beyond, in places like Denmark and South Korea. 

Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado is the Jarvis Thurston and Mona van Duyn Professor in Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on Mexican cultural institutions with a focus on literature, cinema, art and gastronomy. He is the author of seven books including Taco (Bloomsbury, 2025), Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican Fiction, Neoliberal Book Market and the Question of World Literature (Northwestern UP, 2018) and Screening Neoliberalism: Transforming Mexican Cinema 1988-2012 (Vanderbilt UP, 2014). The most recent of his 15 edited collections is World Exhaustion in Latin American Literatures and Cultures, co-edited with Gesine Müller (DeGruyter 2025). He has published over 100 academic articles and chapters in journals and scholarly books across the Americas, Europe and Asia. His public writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Words Without Borders and other publications. He serves as editor of two book series: Latin American Cinema at SUNY Press and Critical Mexican Studies at Vanderbilt University Press. He served as the Kluge Chair for the Cultures of the South at the Library of Congress in 2021.